Widows’ tears opened testimony Wednesday in the federal criminal trial of Xcel Energy over the deaths of five workers at a power plant.

Carolyn DeJaynes — the wife of one of the workers, Don DeJaynes — told jurors about the agonizing wait for news after fire broke out in the underground pipe where her husband was working.

“We were getting phone calls, and the news said they were coming out,” she recalled, her voice trailing off into sobs. “They never came out.”

Xcel Energy Inc. and Public Service Co. of Colorado are charged with five counts each of violating workplace- safety rules in the workers’ deaths in October 2007 at the Cabin Creek hydroelectric plant near Georgetown. The men were resealing the inside of the pipe, called a penstock, when the fire erupted and blocked their only viable escape route. The men died of carbon-monoxide poisoning before rescuers could get gear into the pipe to help.

Much of the debate Wednesday focused on who was to blame for the tragedy.

Prosecutor Jaime Peña said Xcel put money ahead of safety in picking a contractor to perform work at the plant and also ignored safety problems during the job.

Xcel attorney Cliff Stricklin, though, said the tragedy was the result of an unforeseeable accident. He said the greater responsibility for worker safety lay with the contractor that employed the men, RPI Coating Inc., and said Xcel fulfilled its legal safety obligations on the job.

“If it’s not deliberate, if it’s not intentional, it’s not guilty,” Stricklin told the jury.

Criminal prosecutions of companies are rare. If convicted, Xcel and Public Service could have to pay fines of up to $500,000 apiece for each of the five counts. RPI Coating and two of its executives were also indicted; their trial will occur later.

Peña said Wednesday that Xcel chose RPI Coating for the job over another company with a more robust safety plan based on cost and accused the companies of skirting safety rules for “permit-required confined spaces,” which he said included the penstock.

“This is a space that is inherently dangerous,” Peña said.

Stricklin said the companies had a confined-spaces safety plan in place, but he also cast a shadow on RPI Coating’s practices. In cross-examining two of the victims’ widows, Stricklin elicited testimony that RPI officials after the incident broke into the trailers where the women were staying to rifle through their husbands’ belongings. Log books, journals and cameras that recorded safety information about the job were all later reported missing.

Stricklin urged jurors not to cast harsh judgment on the flawed decisions seen in hindsight.

“This was real people, making real decisions, doing the best they could,” Stricklin said.

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